Tuesday, October 16, 2012

What a Trick!: The Tricksters Return

Back in April, I reviewed the entire
first season of the Japanese TV show Trick.
I found it a delightful series. Although the plots often came with more holes
than Swiss cheese, the comedy was fairly decent and the chemistry between the
two leads was absolutely terrific. And so it was just a matter of time before I
got around to season two.

Overall, I thought season two was a major improvement over
the first season. There are still plot holes, but these aren’t quite as jarring
as those from the first season—and to be honest, it forms part of the series’
charm. The subtitles also markedly improved, and so I got to appreciate a lot
more of the jokes. The production design also improved—season one at times
looked like a low-budget 70s TV show. Season two now feels like an
okay-budgeted 80s TV show. (Okay, pardon the bad joke.) Finally, the stories in
season two have got even more intriguing premises than those of season one, and
in general, the plots are a lot more satisfying. Plot-wise, season one only had
a few minor successes. Season two, on the other hand, is mainly composed of
successes.

Some things have changed in season two. Professor Ueda is
now well-known, with a successful TV show and a bestselling book called “Come
Over, Spiritual Phenomena”. Naoko Yamada, meanwhile, is still at the same
apartment with the same landlord, and she still performs magic tricks. Only
now, she resents how the Professor keeps taking credit for the cases she helps
to solve. The two police officers, Yabe Kenzo and his assistant Tatsuya
Ishihara, play bigger roles than they did in the first season, and continue to
admire Professor Ueda while showing nothing but disdain for Naoko.

Keep in mind that my plot summaries will try to avoid
spoilers, and so I won’t describe many of the scams that are exposed on the
side. The episodes really like that kind of thing, where a psychic or medium or
whatnot will try to prove their authenticity with a bold trick. Describing them
all would be a major chore, however, and would probably make this review far
too long. So, without further ado, here are my thoughts on season two of Trick.

Episodes I-III:
The Village of the Six Graves

A man comes to the now-famous Professor Ueda for help. He is
the proprietor of a hotel in the Mutsuhaka Village, a small village in the
mountains of Japan. And he has a serious problem: every year on January 11th,
a guest at his hotel dies! And these are deaths from various causes: lung
cancer, car accident, cerebral haemorrhage, heart attack… It all seems to be
due to an ancient curse placed by six warriors who were murdered by local
villagers. And so, Ueda decides to come to the hotel, and recruits Naoko to
help him out.

Author Sadako Kurisu is found dead in her locked room.

There are plenty of people at the hotel, funnily enough,
including an extremely short politician, his extremely tall assistant, a
best-selling mystery author, her
assistant, an assortment of crazy locals, and our heroes. But when January 11th
rolls along, Sadako Kurisu, famous mystery author, is found dead in her locked
room—an impossible crime!

Before you know it, there are hauntings galore, more death
threats, and midway through episode III, the story arc is completed. (The
second story arc starts after this one ends, also during episode III.) While
this first story is definitely enjoyable, it’s flawed. Some of the tricks are
fairly obvious and the central locked-room mystery is underwhelming. A second
apparently-impossible crime is equally obvious to spot. And when everything is
unveiled at last, the overall plot is rather underwhelming.

However, I can’t help but liking the episode for the simple
fact that I caught a few references to The
Village of the Eight Graves, a famous Japanese detective novel by Seishi
Yokomizo. It hasn’t been translated into English yet, but I do have a French translation handy and I
hope to read it one of these days. Still, it’s great to be able to spot these
references.

Episode III-V: The
100% Fortune-Teller

Yoshiko Suzuki, the 100% accurate fortune teller

Yoshiko Suzuki is a fortune teller. In fact, she’s a damn
good one—everything she predicts comes true! For instance, if she tells someone
to turn left and they turn right instead, a dreadful accident tends to befall
that person. The accuracy of the fortune teller is such that Professor Ueda is
soon on her trail, and he naturally enlists Naoko’s help.

This doesn’t end up going well, however. Naoko deliberately
ignores the fortune teller’s advice, and as a result, Ueda disappears. So Naoko
ends up going to the fortune teller’s “retreat centre”, accompanied by
detective Yabe. There, she explains several of the fortune-teller’s
seemingly-impossible feats, such as a videotape she filmed in front of a
digital clock that displayed the date, in which she makes several correct
predictions about the future.

But the kaka soon hits the proverbial fan, and the fortune
teller seems to get away with murder, practically in front of Naoko’s eyes! But
there is no corpse to be found… Naoko meanwhile tries to convince her fellow
residents that the fortune teller is a fake by setting up her own shop… All this
leads to a final showdown, a literal duel to the death!

This is a terrific episode, which manages to explain several
impossibilities beautifully. Although the non-Japanese viewer is at a serious
disadvantage for the trick of the disappearing corpse, the story is a solid one
overall… and there is a final twisteroo to this episode that is absolutely haunting…

Episode VI-VII:
Psi Trailer

Fukami Hiroaki, psi trailer extraordinaire

This is the series’ masterpiece
thus far. It’s an excellent tale in which Naoko and Ueda attempt to debunk a
“psi trailer”, a man who claims to have psychic abilities and who can trace the
pattern of people’s consciousness. So a challenge is issued—several young women
have disappeared over the last few years, victims of a phantom taxicab. The
psi-trailer is asked to find the women… and, much to everyone’s shock, he leads
the police right to the corpses!

Several more mysterious occurrences take place in this
whizz-banger of a story, including a particularly nifty and effective
locked-room murder. The motives behind everything are terrific, and plot-holes
don’t ruin the episode. It’s a complex plot and one that leaves you feeling
rather satisfied—the entire series seems to have been building up to this, and
boy, it’s worth it!

Episodes VIII-IX:
God’s Damnation

God's (admittedly unlikely) Messenger

The villain of this episode is merely a child, but he claims
to have phenomenal powers. His mother and grandmother support his claim: they
say that this child can make an appeal to God to damn someone, and that person
will die. Nothing can save them— they are effectively doomed. When an
attractive young girl appeals to Professor Ueda to stop the child, the prof
can’t bring himself to say “no”… and so he pays a visit to God’s messenger for
himself!

This plot idea is oddly reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse, down to the charade of
needing a personal item that belongs to the prospective victim. But the
resemblances are superficial, and the ending is completely different from
Christie’s. It’s a satisfying ending, and a few tricks are nicely explained
away throughout the episode. The story also ends on one of the series’ most
disturbing notes when one of the characters suffers a major mental breakdown.

Episodes X-XI: The
Haunted Forest

Prof. Ueda is about to test the properties of a mind-reading rock

Nobody has come out of the forest alive, the villagers
claim. It has been placed under a curse by an evil sorcerer! Sounds like a
perfect opportunity to investigate, and so Professor Ueda and Naoko join an
expedition in the supposedly-haunted forest. But several mysterious things
begin to happen—the explorers discover a mind-reading rock, for instance. There
is a hole in the rock, and if a liar places their hand inside they will be
burned! There’s also a coffin that brings the dead back to life! And an
omnipresent sorcerer who sings at night… in fact, there’s a lot going on!

Unfortunately, for a plot this complex, the resolutions are
not always so great. The resurrection mystery is actually quite easily solved,
and because of this one obvious trick, pretty much the entire game is given
away. As for the mind-reading rock, that explanation is very
anticlimactic. And then, not everything is explained: for instance, we never do
find out why everyone in the forest suddenly starts growing a lot of hair on
one part of their body. And there’s a lot of random events that are never
explained, to the point where you wonder whether the sorcerer is a
hallucination or an actual sorcerer! The whole thing ends on a silly showdown
which basically only drags things out a little longer. It’s an okay episode,
but the premise showed so much promise that when it fails to deliver, it’s
disappointing.

3 comments:

Trick 2 definitely felt like a huge improvement over the first series (though the series didn't become really huge until season 3, when it actually jumped to a prime time slot).

The Psi Trailer is one of my favorite stories of the whole series. It has everything what makes the series work, from a 'grand' fake psychic to lots of story developments and the mystery is actually satisfying!

And while I love the series, I still find it hard to recommend it to those who don't know Japanese. For example, the first story of this series is absolutely hilarious because of the overly polite language the ryokan uses, but it is really hard to translate that. Oh, and for those that know Japanese, you can actually buy the book Ueda wrote. I have it. Twice. It's really funny to read these stories from Ueda's point of view.

I am quite jealous of your knowledge of the Japanese language, Ho-Ling. Reading the newest Keigo Higashino translation, I got all frustrated over why we rarely get good stories like that anymore.

There was one episode -- I think it was PSI TRAILER -- where Ueda opened the show with a piece of narration about what had happened in part 1. The subtitles, at least, made it seem amusing. And actually, the ones I got ahold of had a footnote every once in a while to explain something like overly polite language or a pun. I'm sure there were plenty more than the ones I saw, but those I did see were rather interesting, though I can't say it was on the same level of funny as something that I'd have understood for myself without subtitles.

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